Correcting Papers on the Roof

The chair is metal and older than my teaching career. I carry it up five flights every Thursday, because Thursday is when the essays come in and the apartment is too small for two hundred opinions about the Mediterranean. On the stairs I pass a bicycle, a broken refrigerator, and a girl practising scales behind a door.

On the roof there is a water tank, three antennas, a line of laundry belonging to the family below, and beyond all that, the sea. It is not a beautiful view in the postcard sense. It is a working view: cranes, a tanker waiting its turn, the white of the town coming apart into individual buildings.

Working Light

I start while there is still light. The red pen is a bad instrument — it makes every error look equally important. I have learned to put a small dot beside a wrong date and a long line under a sentence that is right, because the second mark is the one they will look for first.

Tonight there is a paper about the port. The student has confused two centuries, invented a governor who never existed, and then, on the last page, written: 'the harbour was the only place where the city could be both old and new at once.' Nine words that appear in no syllabus I have ever been given.

A wrong answer with one true sentence inside it is worth more of my evening than a correct one without.

The woman below shakes a rug over the parapet and we exchange the greeting we exchange every week. Her radio plays something Egyptian. Two boys on the next roof argue about a bicycle in a way that suggests neither will win. The call to prayer starts somewhere, and another answers it from further east.

After the Last Page

By nine the light has gone and I am working under the stair bulb, which is yellow and makes the paper look older than it is. I finish the last essay, a good one, and feel the small unreasonable disappointment of having nothing left to read.

Forty-one is not old enough to be nostalgic about a staircase, and yet. Sixteen years of Thursdays, the same five floors, the same metal chair. I know which step is loose. I know the roof is unbearable until midnight in July, and that in January the wind takes your papers if you are careless.

I stack the essays, put the pen in my pocket, and carry the chair down. On the fourth floor someone is frying onions. On the second, the scales again, slower now, and I wait on the landing until the phrase finishes before I walk past.